>>521018949
Chinese housing isn't affordable in the most in demand cities due to housing speculation, which itself it due to the Chinese dumping all their money into buying houses as an investment, because they Chinese financial system has long incentivized real estate growth.
On top of that, the Chinese social safety net is very weak. On paper, it's supposed to be pretty good, but in practice, it sucks. Thus, Chinese have one of the highest saving rates in the world, because they don't trust the companies they work for or their own government to provide for them or their parents.
As for mortgages, it's like you say. You're already getting fucked with 20/30 year mortgages. If you finance a car, you're getting screwed there as well. Most things you you buy that require a loan over time fucks over most ordinary people in the long run. But it still gets people the homes and cars they want. It gives them skin in the game. Rent is absolutely worse.
At the end of the day, this is a bandaid on a bigger problem, but the alternative solutions aren't much better. Subsidizing housing will cause worse problems and you can't force the market to make more houses without a financial incentive. Especially when the average home has gotten much bigger and thus more expensive over the years.
That's another part of the problem. People are fucking greedy. If you go back to the 70s or 80s or even 90s, homes were more modest in size and function. People bitch on twitter about not being able to afford a home from their $1500 iPhone with $100k in student debt while going to Starbucks every day, living in the most expensive cities on Earth, expecting to work from home, work only 4 days a week and get 1 month of paid vacation a year. Fuck those people.
Now, you can simply remove a lot of the demand. Maybe that's what's happening if all the immigrants get deported. Then supply goes up relative to the demand. And eventually the boomers will start dying off en masse.